Here are my thoughts on the future of software development.
Engineering a product is no longer a skill that belongs to a select group of people, it is more of a commodity. Anyone who wanted to learn it already has, or can. A small greenfield product can be built with AI today, fast and cheap. You can take any small SaaS product on the market, replicate it in a reasonable amount of time and you will probably find some audience.
The different story is for big, established enterprise-grade solutions. Complex systems still require an experienced person behind the keyboard. You need system thinking, architecture patterns, knowing when AI is going in the wrong direction, catching it and having the knowledge to correct it. That is not easily solved with a prompt, and that skill needs to be gained from years of experience.
So if technical execution is commoditized and products can be copied, where does market advantage come from?
The biggest one is having a real problem to solve. Or it might be in the proprietary data you have, or maybe it is how well you orchestrate AI agents across a complex system. It is certainly in the speed at which you identify a real, specific business problem before someone else does, and the ability to execute fast before a large player decides to put budget on it.
A little bit about the future of careers. Companies are making an expensive mistake removing engineers right now, hoping that AI will absorb that work. But those who equip their engineers with AI tools, put governance in place and adjust expectations accordingly will be winning. Also, those who understand the new dynamic of managing people who no longer write code but monitor execution of agents will have the advantage to build teams and manage people's time and productivity in the right direction.
And there will still be roles that are hard to automate. Strategic thinking, system design at scale, people leadership, process architecture, understanding what to build next, why it matters and how to align a team around it. That will still be there for a long time.